The everyday use of digital technologies is creating vast reservoirs of data. This data has huge, but largely untapped, potential. It could be used to transform public services, promote sustainability and enhance quality of life. Corporate capacity to understand data has become so central to competitive advantage that ‘big data’ has been termed ‘the ‘new oil’ that will fuel our economy in the coming decades’. But it is useless if we don’t have the skills and creativity to turn it into insight and action. Across Europe demand for staff with skills in data analytics is rising at an exponential rate. Four in five data-intensive businesses are already struggling to find the skills they need. Increasingly, knowledge of statistics, correlation, inference, probability and prediction is central to building a scientifically literate population, able to act as discerning consumers of data and as active and engaged citizens. In response, there is a downward curriculum thrust, from tertiary to primary education, with statistical, data analytics and associated ICT skills being introduced into the classroom in different ways and at different rates across the European Union. Research has shown that the key predictors of attainment in mathematics are: students’ perceptions of their capability to master the subject; their enjoyment of maths lessons & the subject matter; and their beliefs about the relevance of mathematics to everyday life. SPIDAS brings three research-intensive universities, the UK Met Office and nine schools/colleges in the UK, Turkey and Catalonia-Spain together to innovate and extend best practice in the teaching of data analytics though student-centred, problem-based learning, focusing on the impacts of weather and climate change. The project will begin with a thorough examination of existing practice and its context in each member state, published in the form of a State-of-the-Art Review. We will then build on this, designing a series of nine pilot projects, to be delivered by SPIDAS partner schools, setting out the learning objectives, the data analyses skills to be acquired, the characteristics of the proposed learning activities and ICT tools to be used in each pilot. We will evaluate each pilot, by creating communities of research - university researchers, teachers and students - to both implement and understand these learning experiences using “design-based research methodology” (Wang & Hannafin, 2005) and a range of quantitative and qualitative methods, including interviews, assessments, student-logs, observation and focus groups. We will synthesise our results, identifying common success factors and lessons, and will draw our conclusions from these together into a structured SPIDAS Toolkit, that others can follow in order to replicate or build on our own experience. As an immediate result of the pilot projects, we expect to: • Raise young peoples’ understanding of role data can play in addressing a wide range of real-world problems • Provide young people with the statistical and ICT/digital skills they need to use data to address these problems; • Help young people to acquire the questioning, team-working and communication skills needed for careers in data analytics; • Raise young peoples’ interest and participation in subjects related to data analytics at higher levels. • Increase students’ critical thinking, collaboration, creativity and caring. • Improve teachers’ skills, confidence and ability to teach data analytics, statistics and other related skills. • Generate new knowledge and capacity to use ICT / data visualisation tools. • Enhance teachers’ ability to design and deliver projects focused on active student-centred / problem-based learning. Through Stakeholder engagement and partners responsibilities for teacher training and creating research impact, we expect the project results to: be mainstreamed into partner schools ongoing practice; to inform the content of initial and in-service teacher training delivered by our institutions and more broadly; to be shared with others schools in each participating region; and to inform regional and national policies on the teaching and learning of data analytics.
The everyday use of digital technologies is creating vast reservoirs of data. This data has huge, but largely untapped, potential. It could be used to transform public services, promote sustainability and enhance quality of life. Corporate capacity to understand data has become so central to competitive advantage that ‘big data’ has been termed ‘the ‘new oil’ that will fuel our economy in the coming decades’. But it is useless if we don’t have the skills and creativity to turn it into insight and action. SPIDAS brought together three research-intensive universities, the UK Met Office and nine schools/colleges in the UK, Turkey and Catalonia-Spain together to innovate and extend best practice in the teaching of data analytics though student-centred, problem-based learning, focusing on the impacts of weather and climate change. The project began with a thorough examination of existing practice and its context in each member state, published in the form of a State-of-the-Art Review. We then build on this, designing a series of pilot projects, to be delivered by each SPIDAS partner school, setting out the learning objectives, the data analyses skills to be acquired, the characteristics of the proposed learning activities and ICT tools to be used in each pilot. We then gathered the lessons from this and created our Toolkit which includes examples of each pilot and data and techniques designed to help schools teach data analytics. The new Toolkit is here: https://spidasproject.org.uk/ In this project we successfully innovated and extended best practice in the teaching of data analytics though student-centred, problem-based learning, focusing on the impacts of weather and climate change. Our project highlighted the way weather and climate connects students and communities across Europe. Understanding climate change, weather, its unpredictability and impacts is one of the greatest data challenge of our time and one of the deepest concerns of young people across Europe. In the project the researchers from three counties (Turkey, Spain and UK) worked with their local school teachers and students to understand how we can respond to these challenges in a collaborative project takes account of differences in our educational systems; builds on our best practice; and draws together and disseminates lessons at the European level. Through Stakeholder engagement and partners responsibilities for teacher training and creating research impact, project results have been mainstreamed into partner schools ongoing practice and especially to inform the content of initial and in-service teacher training delivered by our University partners; they have also been shared with others schools, teacher educators and policymakers in each participating region; to boost the teaching and learning of data analytics.